On Student Loans, Craft Services, and Being a Playwright Who Writes for TV

I left the MFA Dramatic Writing program at NYU in 2008 not so badly off; I had a production at a major regional theater coming up in six months and I had representation. Not so bad, considering I had entered grad school less than two years before having only written two plays. The prospect of going into the world as a playwright was daunting, but maybe I could actually do it. Oh yes, and I had $100,000 in debt. In October of 2009 I bounced my rent check despite getting major financial help from my parents, working several jobs, and having made some money through my plays and a film. Making a living as a writer suddenly seemed like a very foolish plan.

The truth is, I am a playwright who has always wanted to write for television. I love theater; I’ve been a drama nerd for my entire life (in high school once giving myself the challenge of spending the entire day only speaking using lines from Rent), but the idea of sitting in a room full of funny people shouting over each other sounded fun; it sounded like my Sunday family dinners, actually. However, if I hadn’t moved to Los Angeles in 2009 to write for the second season of the HBO comedy Hung, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to still be a playwright. And when I got that lovely four-month hiatus after we wrapped in June, I went straight to work on my next play. Everybody knows that writing for television pays well, but I’m not sure that everyone believes that it makes you a better writer. It does, or it has made me one. So when I read certain theater critics bemoaning the loss of playwrights to television, I get ticked off. Here’s why:

1) There’s a lot more room for writers in television.

Going to graduate school in New York City, I saw everything I could possibly see, and I longed to be the next hot young female writer and get that coveted spot in a season at a place like Playwrights Horizons or Manhattan Theater Club. I wanted to be Elizabeth Meriwether or Liz Flahive or Annie Baker. However, the truth is, most of those off-Broadway theaters have one or two slots for a “new voice” each year, and I wasn’t getting it. There just simply isn’t as much space as there is in television.

2) Television isn’t so lonely.

I admit it: I’m bad at sitting alone all day working on my computer. Like most writers, I procrastinate (by looking up former child actors and finding out “where are they now”), eat copious amounts of unnecessary snacks, and g-chat my unemployed friends while I should be writing. My dirty secret is I like the routine of a nine to five job, of setting my alarm early every morning and experiencing the corporate joy of Friday afternoons. Television is like that. I see eight or nine faces (and a lot more during production) every day who ask me how my weekend was, what I’m doing tonight, and who notice that I showered and put on clean clothes today (which, sadly, my cat does not).

Everybody knows that writing for television pays well, but I’m not sure that everyone believes that it makes you a better writer. It does, or it has made me one.

3) Television is full of damn good writers, and I get to work with them.

In graduate school I was lucky enough to have class with playwrights Marsha Norman, Eric Overmyer, and Jackie Reingold, all of whom have recently written for television. The show I write for is created by and run by playwrights Colette Burson and Dmitry Lipkin, and over the last two seasons I’ve gotten to work with, collaborate with, share offices with, and talk about American theater over late late nights with playwrights as diverse as Eduardo Machado, Brett C. Leonard, and Gary Sunshine. In a great way, television puts playwrights with very different styles and aesthetics together and allows them to work closely, and I, for one, am grateful for it.

4) Television brings immediate gratification.

I have about seven plays sitting in my “random plays” file on my computer that have never seen the light of day and probably never will. Before my play Smart Cookie was produced at the Alliance in 2009, it had had six public readings, two workshops, and no fewer than twenty-three saved drafts on my computer. I had worked on the play for two and a half years, and seeing it fully realized onstage was amazing. It also felt like a long time coming.

In contrast, in television, we sometimes wrote scenes that were filmed the next day (stressful; not recommended). I watched episodes I wrote in April, May, and June air on television in July and August of the same year. Hearing actors read my lines in table reads and on set not so long after I had written them was kind of scary, but it taught me to edit quickly and mercilessly.

5) Television teaches you to not be so precious—about your work and your process

There’s a bit of romanticism, at least among the playwrights I know, about process. I have writer friends who can’t work in their apartments, who have to be in coffee shops, and others who can’t work unless their draft was due last week. In television, sometimes our showrunners would assign us to write a scene and bring it back in an hour—or twenty minutes. I’d shut the door to my little office, panic for about thirty seconds and then will my fingers to start punching keys. Of course, this usually wasn’t the exact scene that made it to production, but it taught me to quit babying myself and suck it up and write.

Likewise, the great thing about theater is that the playwright is the only one who writes it. Sure, you’ve got a director and sometimes a dramaturg giving you notes, but at the end of the day, if you want your character to say “yes” instead of “yeah,” he will. Not so in TV. At first it was hard to see my (hilarious, obviously) lines get rewritten or just plain cut. But after this happened approximately forty thousand times, I got used to it and it ultimately felt very freeing. It also forced me to really clarify my intent and my understanding of the story, so if I felt strongly about a line or an action, I would fight for it to the death —or at least until three a.m., when I got into my little Jetta, went home and tucked myself into bed in my LA sublet full of somebody else’s stuff.

Sure, some things about television aren’t so great: craft services is extremely bad for the waistline, sometimes you have to be on set at 6 a.m. (show me a theater that opens before ten), and Los Angeles, while it has great weather, avocados, and Trader Joe’s, is not New York. Ultimately, though, while I don’t want to live in Los Angeles forever, I’m happy to be there now, as are many other artists I know. Instead of criticizing or bemoaning the loss of playwrights to television, our critics should be thankful to the medium for allowing writers to continue to be professional writers while at the same time honing their craft in a different kind of way.